[WikiEN-l] Simple interface tweak?

Tue Dec 13 19:41:52 UTC 2005

Sorry, I think we have a communication break down. Of course when I
say "watching" this article, I mean how many people have it on their
watch list, not how many people are reading it.

On 12/13/05, Sherool <jamydlan at online.no> wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:02:29 +0100, John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:
>
> > Andrea Forte wrote:
> >
> >> Has it ever been suggested before that a simple indicator of "how many
> >> people are watching this article" could be a useful tool for:
> >>
> >> users who want to figure out what to trust
> >> wikipedians who want to know where to spend their efforts
> >> discouraging vandalism
> >>
> >> Has this been tried? Suggested? Debated?
> >>
> >> Just curious,
> >>
> >> Andrea
> >>
> > It's not exactly new, but I've never figured out why it hasn't been
> > explored further.
>
> Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for
> performance reasons. The only way to get such a feature to work would be
> to generate every page on the fly from the database on every view
> (otherwise the count would be out of date). As it is pages are cached by
> any number of Squid servers so the main database server have absolutely no
> idea how many people are watching any given page at any given time. If the
> caching was turned off the server(s) would probably outright die from
> overwork pretty much right away, it can barely cope as it is at peak times.
>
> Aside from that I don't think the feature would be overly usefull. The
> best you can do is give a count of how many people have loaded the page
> within the last X minutes, there is no way to actualy tell if anyone is
> *actualy* viewing the page. I think a more meaningfull number would be the
> number of active (insert a convenient definition of active here) users
> have the page on theyr watchlist or something like that, but again you
> can't stick that on the page itself with the caching eneabled, otherwise
> it would only update every time someone edited the page (or did an
> action=purge on it). Maybe it could be put in an asosiated special page,
> kinda like Special:Whatlinkshere or some such though, they are not cached.
>
> --
> [[User:Sherool]]
>
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